Dateline Rare Earths Mine Approved in California Despite National Park Service Objections

Dateline Resources has been granted U.S. government approval to mine for gold and rare earths at the Colosseum project inside the Mojave National Preserve in California, despite the fact that major questions about the project being raised by the agency that manages U.S. national parks and monuments.

The Colosseum mine, which lies in the Clark Mountain Range some 80 kilometers southwest of the city of Las Vegas, has been exploited for gold and silver for the better part of the last two centuries, initially by small scale miners. LAC Minerals dug two massive open pits to dig for gold between 1989 and 1993. In 1994, Barrick Gold bought up LAC but failed to develop Colosseum any further, eventually selling the mine to Dateline in 2021, which restarted mineral exploration in recent months.

Activists have expressed alarm at the decision to permit mining in the area which is home to the endangered desert tortoise, as well as some 65 rare plant species.

“Essentially, this mine is managing the destruction of one of the largest units in our national parks system, which are the crown jewels of America” Chance Wilcox of the National Parks Conservation Association told the Los Angeles Times. “We’ve never seen anything like this.” (The National Parks Conservation Association is an independent non profit that is over 100 years old and has historically fought commercial development of national parks.)

With the price of gold at an all time high, Dateline is predicting that it can extract another 75,000 ounces of the precious metal a year for just over eight years. To that end, Kerry Shapiro, a lawyer with Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell, was able to convince government officials that Dateline’s predecessors was operating under permission granted in 1985 by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

This is despite the fact that the authority to manage the area was transferred from the BLM to the U.S. National Park Service (a government agency that manages U.S. national parks and monuments) in 1994 when the Mojave National Preserve was created.

In recent months, the Park Service has challenged Dateline in a series of internal memos, stating that the company’s resumption of exploration activities had destroyed hundreds of local plants without permission.

But when the Trump administration heard that Dateline’s geological studies and gravity surveys suggest that Colosseum has similar underground mineral deposits to the only functioning rare earths mine in the U.S. - MP Materials’ Mountain Pass mine, which lies 10 kilometers away - it acted to bypass the Park Service.

Indeed, the federal government has made no secret of the fact that it hopes that Dateline will also be able to extract much-prized rare earths used in mobile phones, electric cars and military aircraft.

"For too long, the United States has depended on foreign adversaries like China for rare earth elements for technologies that are vital to our national security,” the BLM announced in a press release. “By recognizing the mine’s continued right to extract and explore rare earth elements, [the U.S. Department of] Interior continues to support industries that boost the nation’s economy and protect national security."

This announcement came just days after China, which extracts and refines the vast majority of rare earths globally, announced that it would ban exports of rare earths in retaliation for the U.S. declaration of a global trade war on April 2nd.

Experts say that the Trump administration is ignoring standard procedures, “What’s concerning to me about the Colosseum Mine is that it doesn’t seem to be following a regulatory process that would provide an opportunity or requirement to even go out and do preconstruction surveys,” Jim Andre, director of University of California at Riverside’s Granite Mountains Desert Research Center, told the Los Angeles Times. “That’s the mystery of the activities we’re seeing right now, is that they seem to be shrugging off the due process... and it’s happening within a national park, which is kind of astounding.”

The company is ecstatic. “The Department of the Interior’s public support and confirmation of our rights provide a strong foundation for moving the Colosseum project forward,” said Stephen Baghdadi, Dateline’s managing director, in a press release.

In May, Baghdadi announced that the company was ramping up exploration for rare earths, and has found neodymium, which is used in lasers and magnets.